


A Study in Lilac

by sidsaid



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Desert, F/M, Flowers, Gentleness, New Mexico, Painting, Reylo - Freeform, semi-modern
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24778915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidsaid/pseuds/sidsaid
Summary: Famed still-life painter, Rey Niima, lives quietly in her small cabin in the middle of the New Mexico desert, with only her flowers as company. That is until one clumsy agricultural scientist stumbles into her life.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 13
Kudos: 114
Collections: A Rey by Any Other Name





	A Study in Lilac

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/gifts).



> Hi guys.  
> This is a ficlet for the ‘Rey by any other name’ challenge on the Writer’s Den. I was very inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s work for this one.  
> The moodboard was made by HarpiaHarpyja !!!  
> Enjoy! :D

Rey breathed, taking in the sharp scent of lavender, as her brush shifted once more across the canvas. Another stroke, an inquiring eye, and she was finished. 

She stepped back, the end of her brush poised against her chin, before her gaze drifted over the studies scattered around the room, finding that there was still something missing from the composition. 

Rose had once said that when Rey was celebrated as the finest still-life painter of her generation – Rey guessed after she was dead – that her memento mori and vanitas studies alone would be worth six figures. The thought made her chuckle now, and she moved towards the faux skeleton, rearranging the blooming and budding flowers that were entwined within the bleached ribs. A cage of beauty. Death and life in alignment. 

She knelt to pick through the remaining roses from her crate, when a scarlet bud caught her attention first. Rey paused, her thumb tracing over a thorn – not hard enough to pierce her skin – and she placed the rose back down and abandoned her paints. 

The cabin Rey called a home wasn’t much cooler than the arid heat of New Mexico’s desert, and after months without aircon since moving back here for ‘inspiration’ – as Rose liked to call Rey fleeing from her big-city-made problems – she’d become re-accustomed to the familiar, constant trickle of sweat down her back and across her brow. 

Tying a fresh bandana around her head and then plopping on her wide brimmed straw hat, Rey went out in her paint-covered coveralls. She hopped into her open-topped dirt-encrusted truck and set off, following the cresting sun towards the town. Turning off a couple miles from it, she drove up towards the hillier parts of the barren landscape. Every now and then there’d be palaeontologists or hobbyists sifting through the dirt, looking for fossils, but summer had come early and an hour or two out here without any shade would be an easy case of heatstroke.

Parking up by a particularly spiky looking yucca tree, Rey hoped out, pulled up her thick socks and tightened her walking boots. She loosed the shoulders of her coveralls and tied the arms around her waist before she grabbed a canvas rucksack from the bed of the truck along with her shovel.

The sun eased over its precipice as Rey strolled up the ridge of one particularly steep climb, inspecting the flora and looking around for any hints of something interesting to draw. She was whistling as she descended the other side of the hill before she heard a shout and turned quickly, eyes on the horizon. 

A figure, perhaps a quarter of a mile away was waving, reclined on the hard desert floor. Rey squinted, raised a brow, then sped up her gait, stopping a few metres away when she reached.

It was a man in khaki shorts and a Led Zeppelin shirt, a wide-brimmed hat on his head and an awkward, pained expression on his face as he sat on the floor.

‘You been bitten by a rattlesnake, or something? You’ll get dehydrated just sitting out here like that.’ Rey commented, leaning on her shovel. 

He winced. ‘Not yet, though I think it would have happened sooner or later if you hadn’t turned up. Been here for hours now. Foot’s stuck in a pit, and I think I twisted it.’ 

‘Not looking where you were going?’ Rey enquired, moving forward and inspecting the hole his foot was in It went all the way up to his thigh. She lined up her shovel and began to make it bigger. 

‘Dropped my glasses and fell in almost immediately,’ he let out a self-deprecating laugh, though huffed in relief once his foot was free. 

Rey looked around a little and found a dirty pair of spectacles underneath a cacti. She wiped off the lenses on her tank top, glancing through the thick glasses for a moment before smirking and handing them back to him. 

‘You might want to consider contact lenses if you’re that blind.’ 

He sighed and she held out a hand to him while he put his glasses on. He paused with his hand outstretched, looking at her carefully. She raised a brow, but he took her hand, limping immediately on the sprained ankle. 

‘I hiked five miles here,’ he grumbled. 

Rey chuckled and waved him off. ‘If you can handle going up that ridge, I can get you some ice for your ankle.’

It was slow moving and Rey knew she’d definitely gotten a shade darker from being out for longer than usual, but they managed to get the man bundled into her truck. 

‘So is this when you drive me to your house in the middle of the desert and murder me?’ He asked on the way to Rey’s homestead, his ankle propped on his knee, and his finger poking the swollen skin. 

Rey snorted. ‘It would have been easier to put you out of your misery back there.’ She glanced at him and held out a hand. ‘I’m Rey.’ 

‘Ben.’ He swallowed. ‘Rey Niima, right?’ 

She chuckled. ‘Are you a fan or something?’ 

He nodded. ‘I have your Masked Lily painting in my living room.’ 

Rey grinned. ‘That was one of my favourites.’ Her eyes narrowed, though and she knocked back the rim of her hat lightly as she looked at him, the truck slowing. ‘If you had money enough to buy that painting, you surely could have invested in some contacts.’

‘They itch,’ he complained. 

She smiled and clutched the wheel with both hands as she pulled into her homestead. ‘Can I trust that you won’t start any funny business?’ 

‘With my ankle like this, I’m sure you could easily take me out regardless.’ 

Rey grinned. She’d made sure that if Rose was going to put anything in her press portfolio, it was that she was a black belt in taekwondo.

Ben limped out of the truck and trailed behind Rey into the house. He took a seat on the sofa in her studio as she disappeared into another room. Ben’s eyes were on the expansive studio, the canvases that covered every spare surface and leaned against the walls. Then to the flowers in a multitude of vases and various vessels. He wondered how she had so many fresh flowers, though his questions were answered when Rey opened a door at the end of the room, and sunlight coming through glass almost blinded him. 

She passed him a glass of barely cool water, and he drank it back as Rey pulled over a small stool for his leg and placed a bag of frozen peas on his ankle. 

The swelling wasn’t too bad, and Rey imagined that a couple hours off it would be fine enough. 

Standing once more, she sat at her canvas, quietly sketching and painting as he sat with the quickly warming bag of peas. His ankle felt better after an hour, and he straightened his leg, flexing the injured foot. 

Rey looked back at him and smiled. ‘Tea?’ 

‘Sure,’ he answered, wondering why she wasn’t trying to kick him out. It was already past 4pm. 

He stood and slowly followed her into the next room. The heat was immense – clearly a green-house – and he could hear flowing water as his eyes trailed across the cascades of flowers that climbed trellises, walls and grew tall. 

Ben found himself walking around the room, while Rey filled a stove-top kettle with water from the small sink in the corner.

‘So what do you do, Ben?’ she asked as he moved among the flowers. His eyes fell on a discarded glass, and he filled it with water from the sink.

‘I’m an agriculturist.’ His eyes scanned the plants and he picked carefully, at berries and flower heads, then sprigs of lavender. ‘I was taking soil samples.’ 

‘Really?’ She seemed excited and moved toward him with the two cups of tea.

Ben was sitting cross-legged beneath a rose trellis. Rey looked to his hands as he crushed purple petals into the water, staining it, before carefully arranging the flowers inside. Rey watched his fingers work with care and she smiled, cheeks warming. There was something beautiful about the delicate work. Especially seeing the fragile petals between his large fingers.

‘What’s this?’ 

‘Have a taste and guess.’ 

She snorted lightly, but reached for the glass, turning it around in her hands and admiring the composition, before bringing the glass to her lips and drinking it back. 

'Juniper, lavender and elderflower,' Rey murmured, her eyes closed as a chuckle left her. Ben watched her, chewing on his lip, fighting his smile. Her eyes opened and she grinned. ‘Let me paint you.’ 

‘Me?’ He stuttered, blinking. 

It took approximately ten minutes for Rey to have redecorated her studio with swathes of purple fabric; then dried lavender, freshly cut lilac roses and freesias being nimbly wound into an elaborate headpiece. His hair was still coated in dirt as she wove the object through his raven-coloured tresses, removing his thick glasses and adding more and more flowers until Ben couldn’t see anymore. Rey manually moved him and then he heard her pull a stool out towards her canvas. 

An hour passed with Ben like that, sitting awkwardly covered and overwhelmed by the smell of lavender and roses. They spoke continuously, Rey asking him questions about his work at UC Davis, what his favourite plants were, whether he had a garden where he lived in California. Then another hour passed before he heard her move and lift away the sinking circlet, each flower being placed in arrangements as she worked and freed him. 

Her eyes were on him, assessing him. It was like she knew something Ben did not, and he grew self-conscious as her gaze tore over the slant of his nose, the fullness of his chapped lips. She crouched and lowered herself, hazel eyes level with his caramel-coloured irises, and she smiled. Wide and wild. 

‘Come and see.’

Ben stood, navigating around her towards the canvas, and he froze. 

He was covered in lilac; ethereally so. His skin was touched by it, warmed by it, loved by it. As he imagined, his lips and nose were all that were visible, his lips rouge and chapped. For a two-hour study, the painting was beautifully detailed, but it was the flowers. They seemed to be an extension of him, seeming to grow from the roots of his black-almost-purple hair.

‘Promise me you’ll visit tomorrow.’ She grinned. ‘You’ve inspired me.’ 

Tomorrow was Monday, he was supposed to be in Albuquerque tomorrow. Yet Ben blinked and merely nodded, eyes drawn away from the painting to Rey’s. 

It was an overwhelming look. As if she had drank down every raw, unfiltered part of him over the past two hours. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand at the thought that she could see him so fully, and he liked it. 

So when Rey drove him back to where his car was parked, rather than drive all the way to Albuquerque, he found a motel and one more day turned to one more week, until Rey’s home was filled with paintings of him. And then there wasn’t a need for a motel room off the I-25, just lavender and desert heat, wrapped in bright smiles and paint-covered coveralls. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading ;)


End file.
